It doesn't seem fair to have laryngitis and bronchitis in the spring.  Just outside my studio, there's a squirrel hanging upside down on the peanut feeder,  where Mr and Mrs Wild Canary (he resplendent in summer yellow) are crunching sunflower seeds,  and a sparrow of some sort is working on the seed mix.  The ratty squirrel, who spent the winter here, is at a decided disadvantage for he is in recovery mode;  he just made a disastrous dismount into the naked deer-chewed euonymus instead of executing the elegant leap he had planned. I watch this carnival through the casement window like the little rich boy in The Secret Garden, if he had reeked of Vicks and descended into paroxysms of coughing fits whenever he laughed.

Tomorrow I plan to break out and even pull a few weeds if I have the strength.  This is the absolutely best time of year if you want to see RESULTS in your garden.  The forested area on the far side of the house is pushing up the dozens of daffodils I have planted and the wood violets I have transplanted;  bloodroot clusters of pure white simple flowers have volunteered here and there.  I can see the leaves of the trout lilies, flowers on the pachysandra and the first hints of squirrel corn (a bleeding heart relative) and wild leeks.

The front garden is far more civilized, more's the pity, but there are swathes of scylla, whose perfect blue flowers never cease to lift my heart in early spring. The patch of bleeding heart, my childhood favourite, survived.  The perennial gardens have also grouped themselves into Great Solomon's Seal and irises and Virginia Bluebells as well as many varieties of true geraniums.

The only thing that all of these plants have in common is the ability to survive in the shade.  The wild garden continues to become more shady as the sugar maples thrive and the red oaks soldier on.   But the front will be different this year. Emerald ash borers, whom I first noticed three years ago, have killed all of the ashes in our area and the devastation is severe. On this street, the old green ashes on the other side of the street are all gone and parts of the front garden will be sunny for the first time in thirty years.  While I welcome the opportunity to grow a tomato or two (although further out of range of a dog's hind leg would be ideal), I would much rather have the ashes back.  When will cities learn to scatter their shot and plant a variety of trees species in every subdivision? Monoculture is a doomed venture.

I will leave you with a spring image, the prairie crocus.  I have to sign off now because I can take a hint:  I can't spell my way out of a paper bag this week; twice I have run through all six vowels before I got a word right.  Fine.  I surrender. 

But tomorrow THE GAME IS ON!  I'm BAACK!

I had a sore throat for several days this week and quarantined myself at home.  Even for an  enthusiastic sleeper (my whole family happily headed for bed at 10:15), I rarely sleep  around the clock once, let alone two days in a row.  Boredom is the worst torture I can endure so first I ripped into my brother's birthday books  (his birthday,not mine).  Virtuously, I had previously stifled the urge to devour them but assured myself that no one could begrudge a poor sick woman a few stolen moments with somebody else's books. Miriam Toews' All My Puny Sorrows proved to be so brilliant, so heart-breaking and so hilarious that it was necessary to finish it.  I think I got most of the jam off of the pages too.  I plan to buy another copy (you should too) so perhaps I'll give Scott the pristine one.   The Buried Giant is less mesmerizing but I love Ishiguro's work so will no doubt finish that too tonight.

But one can't live by words alone.  The canvas called, so I hauled out the step ladder and  started working through the transparent glazes.  Usually I am fairly disciplined but a high fever makes short work of sensible work plans and I have been painting everywhere on the canvas, while trying to keep track of what stage each section had reached.  

When Jon came home last night, he found me wearing my pj's, an outdoor jacket, a tuque, and a blue housecoat on top.  Apparently I was also sporting a blue moustache.  Tonight might be no better.  Well, it worked for Dali.

In any case, seeing as the right side is further ahead, here is a  2' x 3' slice of it.  There's still a long long way to go and you can count on the sky no longer remaining pink.  

After kvetching about the difficulty of working on a large (3' by 4') canvas, guess what? The image which is demanding the Leviathon is one I took from a plane window.  The glorious landscape which unrolled itself before me was simply much too grand for anything smaller.  So here I am again, in a studio which remains seven by ten despite my attempts to enlarge it by means of mind control. The width of working space I have is not quite four feet across, with the result that yet again like a Dancing with the Stars male lead I am rotating and sliding this monster of a canvas around.  

Unfortunately, I seem to have lost my show biz touch.  Granted,  Brainsex (the best overview of M.I.T. research on gender differences I have ever read) did report that the average male is better than the average female at rotating a three-dimensional object in space.  My parking reliably demonstrates this theorem. I remind you that there are many tasks at which the female brain trumps the male, but that is not my point here. As Brainsex predicted, my three-dimensional canvas, though only an inch and a half deep, failed to complete one of my rotations.  Somehow, mid-somersault, I had managed to wedge the top rail onto the adjustment screw at a tilt of about 70 degrees both sideways and front-to-back and there the wet canvas hung despite heroic efforts to pull it off.

To make things worse, I had a date with a five-year old friend; Grace is an art aficianado with an inquisitive mind.  My watercolour kit was packed and ready to go.  All I had to do was to wrestle the blasted canvas off the easel so that it could dry in a flat position.  I briefly considered calling the fire department but reason weighed in. Teetering on my stepstool-for-big-paintings, I reflected on the possible headlines:  "Artist Throws Herself into Painting" or "Novel Method of Applying Makeup Proves Fatal."  Suddenly the blinking thing released, and I staggered backward and fell over a footstool, smeared with burnt umber and white but triumphant.  

Grace and I had a lovely time.  It may be a while before I get all of the marbling off the stone walls in the studio, though.

In a piece called "Among the Disrupted" in The New York Times Book Review,  Leon Wieseltier writes: "Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability.  As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes."


The general truth of Wieseltier's observation applies as much to visual art as to journalism.  For decades, the market has favoured that which is different for its own sake.  I remember being shocked to be told by an art gallery curator that I certainly had the "skill set" but that I needed an "angle" or "something different" for my work to succeed. 

This attitude that being different is preferable to being good is bad news for all representational artists; Nonetheless, though tarred with the same brush, we soldier on in the faith that nothing is more beautiful than what is real and that we cannot actually improve upon it.  Think about the difference between animated people and living actors. While our facial recognition abilities may recognize digital creations as humanoids, our brains instanteously assess them as fake rather than superior.  Flaws and irregularities, no matter how tiny, are what make each face unique, alive, and therefore beautiful.  Nor can a thousand digital trees either fool us or compete with one real tree. Representational art neither mass-produces nor uses tricks nor tries to improve upon that which it represents.  It simply seeks to find and honour the world's pied beauty. It chooses "force of expression" over "frequency of expression."

That is not to say that everything is beautiful.  However, I have always thought that it was the task of an artist to mine the loveliness of life on Earth.  Of the thousand or two photos I take each year, only ten or fifteen capture the essence of those moments I was compelled to record;  those few I paint with the greatest force of expression I can muster, never forgetting that my paintings are only homages to the wonder of the real.

   

William Butler Yeats, one of my favourite poets, was a man of great passions -- for the Irish nationalist movement in the early 20th century;  for the occult -- Theosophy and Rosacrucianism, in particular: and for Maud Gonne, a wealthy and beautiful nationalist firebrand.  His poetry about The Troubles is powerful and striking, and no-one has recorded unrequited love quite so eloquently or over such a length of time.

Maud Gonne famously rejected his well-spaced proposals, choosing instead to marry Major John Macbride, Irish Nationalist and Man of Action, but when she returned to Yeats five years later after he had successfully waged a war of words about Macbride, he concluded that longing was preferable to possession and broke up with her.  The occult, however, had staying power.  One of Madame Blavatsky's mystical "gifts" was the ability to write as if dictated to by a muse in the spirit world.  Yeats had been told in seances that he did in fact have his very own spirit guide named Leo Africanus, but, alas, he couldn't access Leo on demand.   When Yeats finally did marry, speculation in the literary world was that Georgie Yeats' main attraction had been the (fabricated) claim that she had the gift.  To Yeats' great satisfaction and her quiet surprise, Georgie Yeats could cough up pages of this stuff.  She could channel Leo Africanus and Bob was Yeats' uncle. I wish I could say that his poetry improved.  In fairness, he wrote "The Second Coming" and "Prayer for My Daughter" in later life, so I shouldn't snipe.

While every writer seeks a muse, few marry a tuned receiver.  Some poets disclaim the need of one: Coleridge, for example, cited genius (his own), after he had found himself having composed "Kubla Khan" during an opium dream.  Well, didn't a dogged English scholar devote hundreds and hundreds of pages in The Road to Xanadu to identify the sources of every single word, phrase and image in Coleridge's previous experience.  Nothing is new under the sun, and writing becomes a rearrangement of brain furniture.

I have neither muse nor drugged inspiration.  Writing has always been like giving birth to an elephant.  All that happens is that I start feeling the urge to deliver.  Today we painters were talking about the challenges of simply keeping a journal.  The only way I have every succeeded is to make the commitment to send these hard-born words into the world.  They are bruised and bloody, but mine.  Thanks for receiving them.

A beloved sister gave me a beautiful dark plum scarf this year;  it was handcrafted on Salt Spring Island, a mecca for artists and artisans.  I treasure it not only because it reminds me of her but also because it is Jon's favourite colour.  How favourite?  Well, one year he took a team to the provincial finals and when, as a coach, he was given a choice of paraphenalia, he immediately chose the pretty women's jacket because it was purple.  And of course he wears it.  

It was the Phoenicians who first created a purple dye (from thousands of luckless sea snails); prized because it resisted fading, this purple actually brightened with exposure to light.  It was literally worth its weight in silver.  Its rarity and cost as a luxury trade item led the Romans to make Tyrian purple the imperial colour, and a child born to a reigning emperor was said to be "born in the purple.".  In 1204, the sack of Constantinople brought an end to its availability.  Snails everywhere celebrated. 

Now, of course, purple can be created in the lab, but still this secondary colour, created by mixing two primaries, blue and red, retains a certain cachet.  And like any mixture, it also gives rise to a range of shades. When the red dominates the blue, you get wine, a colour which I rarely choose, associating it with mens-wear autumn palettes and Tim Hortons' cups.  My preference is for the blue to dominate, producing violet.  When my father died, Jon and I chose to cover his coffin with mosses and blue violets because he had so loved nature, and for years I have kept African violets in the deepest blues as a reminder of him.    


The iris above was so dark purple as to be almost black in places.  I couldn't bear to cut it, so I sat in the garden and painted it, using the colours reflected in the dark petals to define different flower parts and to create dimensionality. Knowing no better, I scored the watercolour paper to create the venation.  

These irises below were so delicate as to be almost transparent.  That is why they look mauve, which is simply purple with the addition of white.  In watercolour, of course, it is not possible to mix with white, so I painted them with a thin wash of alizarin and ultramarine, both transparent pigments, and let the paper shine through.